HSBC accused of privacy breaches for recording employee phone conversations

HSBC recently faced allegations of violating section 632(a) of the California Invasion of Privacy Act for intentionally recording confidential calls without consent and section 632.7(a) of the Act for intentionally recording calls to cellular and cordless phones also without consent.

The plaintiff in this case received hundreds of personal calls from her daughter, who was an employee at the HSBC Card Services call center in Salinas, California. HSBC’s full-time recording system recorded these calls.

“Inside HR” – which housed HSBC’s global, company-wide human resources policies – included an electronic monitoring and device use policy, which provides the following:

• HBSC periodically monitors and/or records certain employee telephone conversations
• Employees may use telephones for occasional non-work purposes
• Personal calls may be recorded but should never be monitored
• The monitoring should be discontinued immediately once the person monitoring identifies that it is a personal call

HSBC’s Salinas facility also had a set of written workplace policies called “Scout.” This included the following. First was the call avoidance policy, which barred employees from making outbound calls to avoid taking inbound ones. Second was the policy for “Recording Disclosure to Third Parties,” which applied when a non-card member was on the line.

Third was the “Call Cardmember Procedure,” which suggested dialogue for...

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